Why of all things do we choose Art to emulate with AI? Is it because we have such poor understanding of what makes good Art that it helps to sell the technology? Time and time again, those who know Art are insulted by this product while the average AI company pats themselves on the back thinking they must be doing something right to piss off the Art snobs. What they're missing is that using AI this way is just pointing out how little the general population understands about Art.
Cynical answer: because art is a field where there is no unambiguous distinction between "correct" and "incorrect", between "good" and "bad". At the end of the day all that art needs to be is "interesting", and that's a much lower threshold to meet than, say, designing a functioning piece of machinery.
Upbeat answer: because the current wave of AI is about getting computers to think fuzzily - dare I say intuitively - in terms that make sense to humans. Art is exactly the kind of thing that until recently seemed completely out of reach to our programming techniques, and the fact that computers can now do it at all still holds tremendous novelty value.
I think kind of accidentally when they wanted to build image recognition. The models happened to be able to generate images also. In the long run I’d imagine a lot of bullshit office jobs are probably more doable by AI. Thinking of all the scrum masters and other nonsense
Online shitposters. You can make surprisingly believable music with pure meme lyrics - something that's not been possible without a lot of effort until now.
I mean, that’s huge. Just finding music to use for a stupid little “story” on Facebook or TikTok post as a small business is an infuriating slog when you don’t really have a budget for such things.
I am a fan. But not in the way it is mostly being used.
A lot of the songs that Suno generates are "good enough". I've been using it recently to do two things. First is to make a set of instrumental songs I call "Canoe Camping in Canada". Basically: Instrumental Americana Folk Accoustic. It is doing really good and generating ambient soundscape songs. I've spent about a week of free credits working and reworking parts of songs it generates.
The second is to make some 15 second showcard jingle music. I create short ads (15-30 seconds) for local companies and events that show at our independent one screen theater in-town before the movie starts. I just needs some audio to slap in while I show an image and some text about something. It works great for that too.
I was kind of curious about if what I was generating would be flagged as copyrighted, like if bits of the songs or melodies were directly out of something else. So, I upload them to Youtube to let their AI see if it can figure that out and haven't been flagged yet. I know that isn't a definitive answer, but to me it is "good enough".
As somebody who recently did a deep dive into music licensing for a podcast, the simplicity of the license terms of ai companies is sometimes appealing, by comparison. Not always
Music licenses are obscenely complex, and understanding almost anyone’s license is a research project. Epic won’t even clarify if you email them, they just tell you you’d better retain a lawyer. Every company redefines terms like broadcast, performance, media, audience, platform, etc. it’s insane
I won’t be using ai music. I’m just saying, I wish you could license human music in a way where you didn’t have to live in fear of breaching the terms by accident
> Despite anxiety from artists, the startups point to the number of people who will soon be able to make compelling, professional-sounding music of their own using at least some AI tools. “There’s going to be an enormous number of folks who there was a barrier to entry, economic or otherwise, that prevented them from entering music,” Sanchez said. “And we think that this is going to enable them to do so going forward.”
"I am sure you artists who made all of our training data are mad, especially considering we're bragging about billions in revenue while you get nothing. But think of all the talentless hacks who can vandalize your work by replacing the lyrics with memes! It's actually pretty selfish of you to harsh their mellow."
Yes, but that’s not the impressive bit. The impressive bit is that a piece of software with a hologram projector (unless you were at the last Coachella, in which case it was the screen for you) sells out concerts worldwide and puts on a performance for “her” fans.
